Prickly City by Scott Stantis for May 20, 2023

Don’t worry nobody will lie this time.

Don’t drop the soap!

A strip of wood used for beating sense into voters.

More vitriol from both sides. Turn off the TV, take two antacids, and call me after election day.

A batten is what will protect the ship of state from the crapfest storm that is Trump.

Hopefully tRump’s vitriolic hate speech will muzzled in the slammer.

It’s a Verb..

And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain

Thrilled me—filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before;

    So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating

    “’Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door—

Fate whispers to the candidate, " You’ll never survive the coming storm." The candidate replied, “I am the coming storm.”

The over and under for Beavis and Butthead’s age pieces before the election is 400.

“What’s a ‘batten’?”

Don’t ask dictionary.com, Winslow. It doesn’t acknowledge that “batten” is a noun, in addition to being a verb.

And I believe that the noun came first. E.g., the expression “batten down the hatches” would refer to using battens (narrow boards) to secure the closed cargo hatches on a ship.